Few aspects of architecture are as dramatic as the cantilever, a rigid structural element that extends horizontally, unsupported at one end, from a building. It’s the closest an edifice can come to flying.
Arguably the world’s most famous cantilever belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, whose room-size concrete balconies float mesmerizingly over a waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania.
“I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it, but for it to become an integral part of your lives,” Wright told his clients, the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh.
As technology has evolved, cantilevers have grown longer and longer. Almost like a skyscraper height war, turned on its side. The longest, as of this February (unseating the Instagram-favorite Marina Bay Sands Skypark in Singapore by about three feet), is located in Dubai, a city full of superlatives that also boasts the world’s tallest building (Burj Khalifa), the world’s tallest observation wheel (Ain Dubai), the world’s largest fountain (Dubai Fountain), and the world’s longest urban zip line (Xline Dubai Marina), among others.
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